“Wordweaving” in Old English Texts

The textile metaphors discussed thus far have chiefly involved associations between women and the spinning and weaving of abstract elements: peace, death, creation, and fate. Another image related to textiles, the subject of this chapter, is that of “wordweaving,” or literary composition. The most direct equation of weaving and the composition of text in the Old English corpus comes in the poem Elene, as the poet-narrator Cynewulf says that, despite his aged mind and body, he wordcræftum wæf ond wundrum læs, / þragum þreodude ond geþanc reodode / nihtes nearwe “wove with wordskills and selected marvels, deliberated at times and searched out ideas carefully through the night” (1237–39a). Cynewulf elaborates on the nature and source of his inspiration: gife unscynde / mægencyning amæt ond on gemynd begeat, / torht ontynde, tidum gerymde, / bancofan onband, breostlocan onwand, / leoðucræft onleac “the Mighty King bestowed a glorious gift and anointed the intellect, revealed a brightness, prolonged the hours, unbound bodily frame, unwound the mind, unlocked poetic skill” (1246b–50a). Similar metaphors appear in the Anglo-Latin corpus as well.

The countries bordering the southern North Sea belong to the most agriculturally productive states in the world. The Netherlands in particular is an agricultural giant. Due to its very high productivity, this country, with its small agricultural acreage, is the world's third largest exporter of agricultural products after the United States and Brazil. Although many people are now rightly concerned about intensive farming's environmental downsides, this remains a remarkable achievement. What makes it even more remarkable is that it began in the soggy, inhospitable wetlands along the North Sea coast. Scholars such as Jan de Vries and Jan Bieleman have shown that already in the seventeenth century the coastal provinces of the Netherlands, with their relatively large commercial and productive farms, were worlds apart from the inland provinces and much of continental Europe with its small-scale subsistence farming.

This book aims to explain the advanced nature of farming in the Dutch coastal zone by looking at it from a comparative perspective and over a long period, from c. 900 to 2000. The coastal provinces of the Netherlands were part of a zone stretching from Calais in northern France to Ribe in southern Denmark, composed of reclaimed marshes, fens and floodplains situated around or even below sea level. On the opposite shore of the North Sea similar regions can be found in eastern England from the Pevensey Levels in East Sussex to Yorkshire. I will call them here the North Sea Lowlands.

Chrétien de Troyes’ twelfth-century verse romance, Chevalier au lion (Yvain), is one of the most widespread stories of the medieval Arthurian legend. The plot, in which the protagonist Yvain is rejected by his lady-love Laudine for breaking a promise to return home in a year's time, and subsequently must perform various heroic deeds, usually in defence of women, in order to regain her favour, needs no rehearsing. It is important to my argument, however, to emphasise the role of the lion in helping Yvain to regain his heroic stature, his identity, and his lady's favour. Julian Harris reads the lion as a Providential companion for the hero. Harris could not, however, explain what precipitates the divine intervention. As Harris points out, the hero cannot ask for help in his moment of greatest need, his spell of madness. Before that moment, Yvain does little to please the heavens. He breaks faith with his new wife, Laudine and, according to many critics, pursues her mortally wounded husband, Esclados, with a cruel vengeance. Yet perhaps something other than the hero's distress or merit persuades the Almighty to intervene. Jean Frappier assures us that Chrétien ‘est un apologiste du mariage’ (‘is an apologist for marriage’), and we know that the poet often borrows from Ovid's oeuvre while making frequent use of Christian symbols, the lion among them.

‘Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water.’

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, III, Ch. 3

The Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93) encountered at least one weighty Dostoyevskian riddle – his sexuality. It affected his posthumous reception, when the question arose whether he died of cholera or by suicide mandated by a hastily convened court of honour or one of his ardent admirers, Tsar Alexander III, to forestall a scandal about the composer's pederastic trysts. As recently as 2018 this debate triggered renewed attention after the sensational release of a trove of family correspondence. For much of the twentieth century, the Soviet government had methodically groomed the composer's official commemoration: ‘… it would have been unthinkable to accept the idea that Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Russia's national treasure, was a homosexual. Therefore, he wasn’t’.1 Nevertheless, the composer's diaries, released in 1945 as the Second World War came to its tumultuous close, contained one compelling passage from 23 April 1884: ‘There was much Z. Oh, what a monster of a person I am!’2 In a footnote the editor of the diaries, Wladimir Lakond, surmised: ‘This was the secret symbol that, it appears, Tchaikovsky employed to refer to his homosexuality’.3 An entry from the previous day regarding the composer's thirteen-year-old nephew Vladimir Luovich Davidov prompted this annotation: ‘Tchaikovsky was very attached to him from his childhood and there is reason to believe that in his late years the attachment was more than platonic’.

A Brief History of the Destroyer

The above description, included at the start of John Henshaw's developmental history of the V and W destroyers, is surely one of the most fitting. Many such developmental histories of destroyers have been undertaken, giving some indication of the ship's broader significance and meaning. Naturally, however, an intricate story of construction and design remains prominent within such texts. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the destroyer represented somewhat of an unknown quantity, developed in response to specific and especially modern threats – that of torpedo craft and later the submarine. Destroyers had been produced by several navies in the mid-1880s, with Spain, Germany, Japan and Britain all constructing versions of torpedo-boats, developed via modern armament dynamics combined with international rivalries – especially the need to out-build and out-gun Britain's European neighbours. Traditionally, naval warfare relied on surface attack and heavily built battleships, but the torpedo meant that relatively small and cheap ships could wreak absolute destruction.

Picturesque Photography in Latin America

Picturesque photography in Latin America has an enduring legacy. Like magic realism, a literary style often associated with this region of the world (Faris and Parkinson Zamora, Hart and Ouyang), the picturesque as found in Latin American photography often underscores intriguing differences between Latin America, on the one hand, and Europe and many regions of North America, on the other. Both representations share a focus on the exotic, the beautiful, or inviting dissimilarities that Europeans and North Americans have found attractive while eschewing other aspects that cast Latin America in a negative light. The picturesque visions of the region (in the visual arts such as painting) tend to overlook important, but difficult, social truths while promoting the idyllic and the foreign (Bethell 77–80). So extensive were the different stereotypes and picturesque visions before them that writers lacked words, so they used images to represent what they observed (Poole Race and Modernity 104). Photographers found themselves focusing on professions from the popular classes such as aguadores “water carriers” and other elements from the picturesque (Poole Race and Modernity 119). Painters faced similar challenges in sifting through the vast options of the picturesque to represent Latin America. Attractive and enduring, as you will see, the legacy of the picturesque gave rise to the anti-picturesque (which continued to employ the original aesthetic to further its own arguments), which can be viewed as another representational strategy that can function as a middle ground between the picturesque and the documentary. Importantly, the ability of the picturesque to attract visual engagement enables it to promote Latin America in many ways.

Vessel Key: A=American, B=British, D=Danish, Dch=Dutch, H=Hamburg, M=Malay, P=Portuguese

In her memoir Wahrheit aus Morgentraumen, Friederike Brun fondly recollects her visits to Ny Bakkehus, the summer dwelling in Frederiksberg of the royal physician Johann Justus von Berger. ‘In the summer they moved into a friendly country house in Friedrichsberg, half a mile from Copenhagen, on a hill by the sea, which is why it was called Bakkehuus (the hill house).’ Berger's passion was music and he assembled a variety of literary and musical guests at Ny Bakkehus. These social gatherings ended when Berger died in 1791. But the Frederiksberg venue resurfaced again under the auspices of Knud and Karen Margrethe ‘Kamma’ Rahbek, and became one of the most significant literary meeting places of the early nineteenth century.

Though in a rural setting, and difficult to access during the winter months, Frederiksberg had gained popularity during the eighteenth century when King Frederik IV built his summer palace, Frederiksberg Slot, on top of the hill known as Valby Bakke. The palace was extended and rebuilt several times during the eighteenth century, and an English landscape garden (Frederiksberg Have), replaced the more formal Baroque garden. Kamma Rahbek's acquaintance, the royal gardener Peter Petersen (1754– 1826) was instrumental in the redesign of the garden in 1795. By the time, the Rahbeks moved to Frederiksberg in 1803, it had become an affluent yet still rural area.

There were, as the actress Johanna Luise Heiberg (1812–90) observed, ‘four Hill houses’ [‘fire Bakkehuse’]: the Gamle Bakkegard (Old Hill Farm, now the site of the Carlsberg Building), the Ny Bakkegard (New Hill Farm, partially rebuilt), the Bakkehus (now Bakkehuset Museum), and the Ny Bakkehus (now demolished).